Are bike lanes, infrastructure one path to safety?

Monday

May 6, 2013 at 12:01 AMMay 6, 2013 at 6:17 AM

If state and municipal leaders want more people in Massachusetts to bike, then designing new streets and retrofitting old ones to be more rider-friendly is where the rubber meets the road, say transportation planners and advocates.

David Riley

If state and municipal leaders want more people in Massachusetts to bike, then designing new streets and retrofitting old ones to be more rider-friendly is where the rubber meets the road, say transportation planners and advocates.

The answer is not always as simple as painting a bike lane. Transit planners have a whole lexicon of options to delineate how and where cars, trucks and bikes should travel – from sharrows and bike boxes to cycle tracks – depending on the location.

These types of road designs are meant not only to make it clearer and easier for existing cyclists and drivers to share the streets, but to encourage more people to see biking as a safe and legitimate means of transportation, planners said.

“You have to create an infrastructure where people can choose to ride,” said Cara Seiderman, who manages the Bicycle and Pedestrian Mobility Program in Cambridge, a city that has made extensive street upgrades aimed at cyclists since the 1990s.

In another sign of cyclist-friendly improvements taking hold, Boston has installed 60 miles of bike lanes since 2007. Based partly on infrastructure, the League of American Bicyclists also recently has recognized Arlington and Somerville as Bicycle Friendly Communities.

The state is home to a number of off-road trails and paths, too – the largest include the Minuteman Bikeway from Bedford to Cambridge and the Cape Cod Rail Trail.

For its part, the state Department of Transportation is looking to include bike paths and lanes where appropriate in its projects, said Catherine Cagle, the agency’s manager of sustainable transportation. MassDOT also led 65 workshops last year on Complete Streets, a type of planning that includes cyclists, pedestrians and public transit, and has had a plan since 2008 to eventually create a 788-mile, long-distance bike network.

Yet outside the urban core and major trails, dedicated bike routes in eastern Massachusetts can be frustratingly incomplete or disconnected, cutting out at busy intersections or failing to tie important destinations together, several cycling advocates said.

Towns and cities often have to fight for their share of transportation funding, meaning bike paths do not always continue across town lines, advocates said.

Transit and public health groups are forming a coalition to try to close some of the gaps, said Steve Miller, a board member at the nonprofit Livable Streets Alliance and author of a transit blog, “The Public Way.”

The tools available include sharrows, a term for simple pavement markings that show an arrow and a bike to serve as reminders to drivers that cyclists can share the lane. There also are cycle tracks, or dedicated bike lanes separated from cars by parked vehicles or a physical barrier, and bike boxes, which allow cyclists to line up at red lights ahead of cars.

Bike lanes should be at least five feet wide, sometimes with a buffer to protect cyclists from opening doors of parked cars, said Jason Schrieber, a principal at planning firm Nelson Nygaard Consulting Associates.

Some planners also favor so-called “traffic calming” measures, such as narrower car lanes.

“The narrower your road, the lower the speed, the less crashes,” Schrieber said. “It’s very direct.”

The right approach depends heavily on the location, said David Watson, executive director of the Massachusetts Bicycle Coalition, or MassBike.

“It’s not about prioritizing bicyclists and pedestrians over drivers,” he said. “It’s about finding balance.”

Cyclists are not unanimous on what works. John Allen, a longtime cyclist and advocate, has been a vocal critic of many recent changes in Greater Boston.

He argued that bike lanes sometimes are too close to parked cars and that a proposal to build a cycle track in his city, Somerville, will actually endanger cyclists.

“The problem is that I’m seeing projects being designed and built in serious disregard for safe design,” Allen said recently.

Others say the evidence suggests otherwise and they see hope for safety in numbers.

“In almost every case I’ve ever heard of, as the number of cyclists goes up, the rate of bicycle accidents goes down,” Miller said.

At a state level, Cagle said MassDOT wants to see consistency, so that drivers and cyclists know how to handle different road markings or lanes wherever they are.

Advocates said it’s also important that cyclists have places to lock up their bikes when they get where they’re going. Seiderman said she has seen employers more routinely including bike parking, showers and other cyclist-friendly facilities for their employees.

“More recently, it’s become easier and easier, where developers and companies are realizing that’s what their workers want,” she said.

(David Riley can be reached at 508-626-4424 or driley@wickedlocal.com.)